Brewing and Retroactive Idea Theft

Howard and I finally did it. We finally brewed some beer. We bottled it yesterday, so we've just got a few weeks until it's carbonated and ready to drink.

We made two one-gallon batches of my California Sunshine Ale. The first was a simple scale-down of the recipe I posted earlier. The second was a variant that completely dropped Cascade hops for Amarillo.

It's pretty uncommon to brew in one-gallon batches. Practically every recipe online is written for five gallons. Brewing at all is a lot of work, so people try and make it worth their while. Larger batches are also more stable and, according to the owner of our local brew store, a difference of scale changes extraction rates and thereby the recipe requirements.

I decided to brew in small batches knowing full well the reasons it was uncommon. I didn't get into homebrewing to save money. The ingredients for making beer cost roughly half the retail price for buying craft beer from the store. That may sound pretty good, but when I take into account the work and risk involved in the process and the superior quality and variety of beer available at the store, it's barely breaking even. Five gallons makes fifty beers and that is a heck of a lot of any single kind of beer for a person who's accustomed to buying single bottles. The fuzzy feeling that comes from knowing my beer was made with my own hands only gets me so far. I decided to start homebrewing to learn more about beer and to kick around my own recipe ideas. We may have had to borrow Howard's lab scale to measure hops in hundreths of an ounce, but I'm a scientist, after all.


So after one and a half hours of driving and one and a half days' work, Howard and I have twenty-three bottles of beer to show for it and that's fine by me.

Above: Our cooling system to keep the beer around 70 degrees in the middle of the Davis summer (my idea)
Below: Our chicken wire drying rack (Howard's idea)

On a separate note, it has come to my attention that American brewers have been time traveling from years past into our present future and viciously stealing my beer ideas from this blog. It turns out that Cascadian Dark Ale aka Black IPA is an established northwestern variant on the IPA style that uses dark malts to conjure an intimidating color. While it sounds like a lot of breweries are using debittered black malt to give the maximum color without affecting flavor that much, some have actually embraced the pairing of hop bitterness and roasted maltiness.

Also, on the day before we bottled our California Sunshine Ale, I happened across the spitting image of my concept for the beer. Deschutes Brewery's Twilight Summer Ale is an APA that lightens up on the crystal malt, adds something toasty to pair with grilled food and relies on a combination of four hops with emphasis on Amarillo.

To counterbalance said losses from my creative stable, I'd like to present a new beer concept. I was idly reading the ingredient list on Barq's Root Beer and noticed that the last ingredient was acacia. For those of you who don't know, acacia is planted as a shrub all over orange county hillsides for erosion control. It has oval grey leaves and little fuzzy yellow flowers that get pollen all over the place. It has a very distinctive smell, like a dirty, grainy version of some platonic true herb. As soon as I'd read it I started to either imagine or taste it in the Barq's (to my satisfaction).

Acacia would be great in a light summer porter. You heard it from me first, somebody should brew a summer porter with acacia leaves.

On Dana Point

I lived in Dana Point from the age of 11 until I left for college. My mom still lives there and my dad still lives in the neighboring town of San Clemente. The pictures were taken my senior year of high school.

Dana Point is a coastal town in Southern California, located almost exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. Dana Point sits at the southern tip of the greater LA/Orange County metro area along with neighboring San Clemente. To the south of these two beach cities lies a wilderness area dominated by Camp Pendleton. Dana Point gets its name from a mention in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, where he described throwing cowhides off the bluffs of a cove that served as port for Mission San Juan Capistrano.

Dad, Donna and Bri in the foreground, Dana Point bluffs and harbor in the midground and Catalina Island in the background, January

San Clemente brags that it has the best climate in the world. Both cities have an average 342 days of sunshine and typical highs in the high seventies/low eighties in the summer and low sixties in winter, respectively. Like all of California, the bulk of annual precipitation falls in winter months. However, among the cloudiest months is June, a phenomenon known locally as "June Gloom" and caused by warming ocean temperatures.

Matt Wingert in my front yard, December

Trees commonly planted in Dana Point include palms, eucalyptus and coastal pines. Subtropical and Mediterranean plants are easily grown. Some classic continental plants that require chill or extreme heat are difficult to grow, like cherries and watermelons (though that didn't stop me from growing a 94lb pumpkin). Undeveloped headlands and canyons are mostly coastal sage scrub, a chaparral-type mixture of californian sage, sagebrush, lemonade berry and coyote broom.

Demographics in Dana Point are mixed, not possessing the wealth of northern neighbor Laguna Beach. A significant number of Mexican immigrants and lower-middle class whites live in apartments, while professional class people commute to central Orange County and live in hillside houses with ocean views. The local economy is driven primarily by tourism and the aforementioned commuters. The worst traffic jams in our area happen on sunny Saturday afternoons.

Many neighborhoods in Dana Point were developed slowly enough to evidence an eclectic mix of social classes. The oldest houses are beach cottages, built in the 50's with low square-footage and flat roofs. Many of Dana Point's N-S streets are named various colors of lanterns (ie Blue Lantern, Golden Lantern, Amber Lantern). The town's decor is mariner themed, and houses are frequently painted marine blue-grey. The town has approximately reached build-out, though adjacent landlocked cities demonstrate textbook McMansion sprawl, particularly Laguna Niguel, a place that handily manages to be both much wealthier and much uglier than Dana Point (I have a lot of high school friends from Niguel and that is fact, not opinion).

The local public education system is excellent. Dana Hills High is both a Blue Ribbon and California Distinguished School. It offers a large number of Advanced Placement courses and produces high standardized test scores. The school football team has always sucked. The school surf team is pretty good, but never beats neighboring rivals San Clemente, who frequently contend for the State Championship title.

Prom photo, taken at one of the half dozen locations commonly used for weddings within walking distance of my house, May

The two cities collectively lay claim to a handful of excellent surf beaches that host annual surf contests including Salt Creek, Doheny, T-Street, Trestles and San Onofre. Dana Cove was famous for a surf break called Killer Dana until the harbor was built. Surf culture is everywhere, most visible in the many local board shops, board-laden cars and the popularity of the word "surf" in mostly taqueria restaurant names (one Dana Point restaurant, in fact, succinctly named "Taco Surf"). In addition to both Mexican-owned and white-owned taquerias, the region has a lot of local burger joints that recall the glory days of Southern California car culture, as well as a mix of 20$ entrée restaurants with an emphasis on California cuisine and sushi.

The overall culture is laid back. Politics are mildly conservative. In spite of those politics, hostility towards immigrants is remarkably low. Upper-middle class people either appreciate the Mexican immigrant population for services rendered (though I don't know anyone with an in-house maid, as pop culture might have you believe of OC, even in Laguna) or respect them for their strong work ethic. The stereotype of the lazy Mexican has always struck me as a foreign idea, product of Los Angeles demographics.

View of my neighborhood from my front yard, February

I live in a beach cottage in a mixed-income part of town. The yard is fronted by a couple of Canary Island Date Palms. It takes me 20 minutes to walk to Doheny with my surfboard underarm. I love the diversity of houses here. I love the weather, especially the foggy and cloudy days. I love the smell of sagebrush. I love getting burritos after a day at the beach with friends. I love walking downtown to pick up avocados from little Mexican markets. I love that my prom photos have a backdrop most wedding photos would be in envy of (in fact, Brandon's cousin flew from the east coast to get married in Dana Point this weekend). I love hearing Bandas on the neighbor's radios. I love Dana Point.

On Macrobrews

In the vocabulary of beer snobs, "macrobrew" is a dirty word. It's shorthand for beers brewed on a massive industrial scale, made with adjuncts (corn and rice) to reduce costs and lighten flavor. Well, mostly just to lighten flavor, but wouldn't cost-cutting make a better story? The style is an American invention that came about between the post-prohibition era and WWII, and befitting its American origins, practically every country in the world's national bestselling beer is made in the style.

The style I'm referring to is also called American Adjunct Lager or American Light Lager. A lot is made of the style's "refreshing light flavor" or, alternatively, it's complete lack of flavor. I'm in the former camp. Not without reservations, mind you, but there's a lot to be said for macrobrews. They're the most flexible food beer I know (anything from curry to fried chicken), crisp and quenching on a hot day and extremely sessionable, which is to say that you can drink a lot of beers without getting sick of them (or too drunk).

Now before you rush off to buy a thirty pack of the first macrobrew you find, I'll give you a rundown on the available brands:

Keystone Light and Natural Ice - These beers fall into a subclass of the American Light Lager family denoted "subpremium" (aka frat beer). This is the beer you shotgunned or beer-bonged or keg-stood in college. While the nature of the brewing business means that ingredients cost little enough that "premium" macrobrews don't really skimp on quality, subpremium macrobrews cut every corner available, including taste. Thumbs-Down.

The rest of the beers reviewed qualify as either premium or superpremium beers. None of them have noticeable off-flavors, which is not to be discounted when brewing a beer with such slight flavor. In the words of my beer professor, you could hide an elephant in the flavor profile of most Stouts or IPA's.

Budweiser - The best-selling beer in the world, Budweiser is the poster boy for the macrobrewed American Adjunct Lager. Budweiser is the biggest buyer of rice in the US, but you can't really taste rice in the flavor profile. In fact, the most distinct thing about Budweiser is that you can't grab onto any particular flavor at all, except maybe a soft sweetness and high carbonation relative to its peers. I can't say I'm a fan of Bud. I find it overcarbonated, uninteresting and I have no affection for the relative sweetness. Thumbs-Down.

Miller High Life - High Life turned out to be the closest thing I've found to what I was expecting Budweiser beer to be-- a light, rice-driven macro with a perfectly clean taste. By "clean taste" I mean that like Bud, there are no specific flavors to latch onto. Unlike Bud, however, it lacks noticeable sweetness or excessive carbonation. I can't say this is a beer I drink a lot of, but purely on the merit of fully realizing the clean, light and balanced archetype, I give this beer a thumbs-up.

Miller Genuine Draft - Miller's Genuine Draft stands in opposition to High Life. This is a relatively strong-tasting macrobrew with notes of rice and especially corn on top of an overall barley flavor. This is among the most engaging and least clean of the macrobrews and among my most-drunk beers. Thumbs-up.

Coors - While an advertising campaign based on their beer's "coldness" hasn't done anything to curry my favor, Coors is a solid beer with a light, clean corn taste. I'm afraid, however, that it doesn't fill a niche that I have much use for. This gets a thumbs-sideways.

Pabst Blue Ribbon - This is another rice-driven macro, but in contrast to High Life and Bud, there's a pronounced rice flavor to this beer. It's clean-tasting, but has subtleties lurking in the corners. I've said before on this blog that I thought there was a note of apples and potentially metal in this beer. I think it's rather fitting that this became the beer of "the scene". Strangely enough, it was also the beer of choice of our working class neighbors at the Kingston Apartments. I almost always buy it when the 12-packs go on sale. Thumbs-Up.

Michelob Ultra - Very clean and very light. High Life is a little asymmetric and overcarbonated by comparison, which is drawing a pretty fine line because High Life is pretty darn balanced. I'll give this a thumbs-up and let you decide whether or not you're willing to foot the rather high price.

Rolling Rock - Tastes like peanuts. Otherwise pretty boring and overpriced. Thumbs-down in general, but thumbs-sideways if you want a beer that tastes like peanuts (Thai food, anyone?).

Moosehead - Usually skunked. Otherwise boring and overpriced. Thumbs-Down.

Tecate - Tastes remarkably like MGD. It too is full of corniness and grain flavor. My preference for this over MGD could easily be psychosomatic. For all the fuss they make over this being imported, the fact doesn't seem to interfere with the pricing or the taste, which fits in easily with the American cadre of macros. Thumbs-Up.

Heineken and Becks - I haven't drunk a lot of these beers, but what I've had has left me unimpressed. There's nothing about these beers that makes them better than their domestic cousins, nor anything that justifies their inflated cost. In fact, because of the green glass bottles and extended shipping time, these beers are more likely to be skunked. If it weren't for the skunking or extraordinary price, I'd consider these beers more carefully, but as it is, they get a definite thumbs-down.

The following two beers don't quite fit the Adjunct Lager category, but this is probably the best place to talk about them.

Corona - This is a clean, astringent beer with a slight zestiness (from the hops?). Frankly, I don't think it's worth drinking without lime, particularly in light of its decidedly "imported" price range. It makes a great canvas for a study of lime flavor, though. The astringency, which is a borderline off-taste on its own, melds beautifully with the citrus. Naturally, key limes are even better in it. Thumbs-up as long as there's a lime wedge involved.

Pacifico - Has a similar clean-astringent profile to Corona, but with a more filled-out malt background. This is a beer that's great on its own and very flexible. It would also be great with lime, but its even better with food. This is my favorite Mexican beer. Thumbs-Up.

EDITS: Check out this interesting article on the same subject. I agree with the descriptions pretty well, but stick to my ratings in cases where we differ.

Trader Joe's brands both get my vehement thumbs-down. They have some great other beers, but Name Tag and Simpler Times are impressively bad.

Olympia is flavorful, a little fruity, and I think it totally works. Thumbs-up.